Question: Consider sequences that consist entirely of $A$'s and $B$'s and that have the property that every run of consecutive $A$'s has even length, and every run of consecutive $B$'s has odd length. Examples of such sequences are $AA$, $B$, and $AABAA$, while $BBAB$ is not such a sequence. How many such sequences have length 14?

Explanation: Let $a_n$ and $b_n$ denote, respectively, the number of sequences of length $n$ ending in $A$ and $B$. If a sequence ends in an $A$, then it must have been formed by appending two $A$s to the end of a string of length $n-2$. If a sequence ends in a $B,$ it must have either been formed by appending one $B$ to a string of length $n-1$ ending in an $A$, or by appending two $B$s to a string of length $n-2$ ending in a $B$. Thus, we have the recursions\begin{align*} a_n &= a_{n-2} + b_{n-2}\\ b_n &= a_{n-1} + b_{n-2}  \end{align*}By counting, we find that $a_1 = 0, b_1 = 1, a_2 = 1, b_2 = 0$.\[\begin{array}{|r||r|r|||r||r|r|} \hline n & a_n & b_n & n & a_n & b_n\\ \hline 1&0&1& 8&6&10\\ 2&1&0& 9&11&11\\ 3&1&2& 10&16&21\\ 4&1&1& 11&22&27\\ 5&3&3& 12&37&43\\ 6&2&4& 13&49&64\\ 7&6&5& 14&80&92\\ \hline \end{array}\]Therefore, the number of such strings of length $14$ is $a_{14} + b_{14} = \boxed{172}$.